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Gentoo really is a great operating system, and maybe even for beginners. One of Gentoo's many strengths is the portage system. The portage system is a easy to use system that allows you to build just about any application from source automatically (and often with Gentoo optimizations). It can automatically build all the dependencies for the program too, saving you much time and effort. The portage system also supports binaries (must mention to avoid stoning) however that is often only used in replication systems. Since you can easily setup your own portage mirrors you can create your own custom packages (either that compile from source or are binaries) and easily deploy across your own servers. This would allow you to configure packages on one machine and then just distribute the binaries across duplicate machines if you wished (as I have heard of being done). I also have found Gentoo emerges rarely fail when compared to some of the problems you can run into with RPM. Another large benefit of gentoo is it doesn't install anything that isn't needed to clutter your system up. It will install the bare bones, (ssh, etc) and then you can emerge anything you want. This is much nicer than most OS's which will load it with crap from the start. It is one of the most configurable distributions I have seen, and every Gentoo install is truly unique. Again, while it may give you the barebones to start it takes little work (minus the cpu time to compile) to get it to where you want it. As I said earlier, I think Gentoo may even be a bit beginner friendly. While setup is a bit long and not nearly as easy as something like Redhat, they have a very easy to follow tutorial which walks you through it step by step that I think most beginners could follow. In addition, they have 3 different ways to install Gentoo. A live cd version that is basically bootable and then you have 3 different stages you can choose from. Stage One is a bit insane, for those who really need total control over what is installed. For most people Stage Two is fine as it still compiles virtually everything from scratch, giving you a ton of control, just saves some time over Stage One. Stage Three is for those who just need something fast or are a bit new, and can install binaries of various things to save you compile time and easy of install. This makes Gentoo truly amazing.

Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming

And hardware support... The only reason my laptop is still running XP is that my wireless card refuses to run.

After a bit of hunting it seems that the problem is an IRQ conflict between the inbuilt LAN card (which cant be disabled in the BIOS) and the IRQ that the PCMCIA tries to grab when initializing the card.

The card works in windows without a hitch.

I dare say that someone with skills beyond mine in Linux could probably get it working, but for now im stuck in windows, as are most of the computer using population.

The only thing I miss about Debian now that I'm on Gentoo is the easy ability to clean out the install. With Debian I could always go into dselect and walk through all the crap I had installed and remove it selectively, with full dependancy checking. It was tedious, but I was glad to be able to do it every now and then. As far as I can tell, Gentoo has no comparable functionality.

Agreed. Portage should handle clean, depclean and unmerge better, particularly for libraries. A good start would be a version of etcat that shows me what version of libfoo appbar is linked against and what versions of libfoo are installed and available on the portage tree... hmmm... come to think of it, sounds like a project for me....

And this is one thing I really love about gentoo. Especially if you're a newbie to linux (I wasn't, but I like you, was certainly no master). Following the installation guide that gentoo provides was a very educational experience for me. Not only does it tell you step by step what to do to get your system up and running, it tells you WHY you're doing it. I was very impressed with the instructions. Oh, and when I ran into any problems at all, their forums had the answer, and when they didn't have the answer, someone responded to my post within a matter of a couple hours, and had the solution to my question.

the more or less manual install, coupled with the very good documentation and guides, helped me grow acustomed to linux more than I had by just using it through shell accounts or on friend's boxes

the full immersion that comes with its install is a learning experience that can't be beat, and when help is needed there are docs, forums, and irc -- and let me say the irc (imo) is one of the best ways to learn... although a moment ago #gentoo had 1013 people, channels like #gentoo-laptop (since I have a laptop) are excellent resources

On topic when replying to this guy and still funny after all this time... I've got the Karma to burn on the troll mods:)

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great
features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes
and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's
look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really
means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something,
as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the
latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single
program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at
endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to
international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the
text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on
Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other
programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though
only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations,
and RPMs and.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved
by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me
more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and
Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta
snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once
every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near
future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far
too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is
now using it, so it must be growing!"

I do find that emerge is a wonderful tool for installing with, however, I think they still need to do some work on the installation guide... I managed to get my gentoo box up running KDE and SAMBA (+some other stuff I require) but, the lack of a decent troubleshooting guide, and my relative inexperience with how Linux actually DOES what it does, means that I'm buggered if I can get the sound to work in an X session.

Very helpfull people there. Base install of Gentoo comes with "irssi" IRC client that you can hook up to right from the install CD. Ask your question (no need to ask "can I ask a question") and try to be as specific as you can.

Now, this IS an IRC channel so you might run into a few knuckleheads there, but be patient and you WILL be helped. The people there are very well versed and many of the OPs are themselves Gentoo developers and they know the system. They will help.

I go there to help also. It's my small way of giving something back to the community as I'm not a developer, but I can try to help others.

Most people are very patient there, but if you're asking a question that's plainly right in the install guide, they'll direct you to that usually.

Don't be a jerk there and you'll do fine. Others I've seen log into the channel and go "this sucks, I can't get this and this working...Gentoo sucks...I can't do anything". Then when no one responds in about 20 seconds they shout "how come no one wants to help me...this sucks". And on and on. Some people are beyond help it seems...and not for just and OS install either, hehe.

But then again, some people don't feel they're ever helped it seems. I'm not saying you're one of them of course, but some don't have the patience.

It is free by the way. I've found #gentoo an enormous help when I was first installing my system. They helped me get everything up and running and pointed out certain areas I would need to look more into etc etc. I was amazed at how helpfull.

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell...""I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

Obviously, it's bad RPM Juju to mix and match RPMs from different distributions. As long as you stick with RPMs built for your specific release of

um..if you knew anything about Gentoo then you would know that it doesn't touch configuration files, if there is a new config file it will rename the NEW file as something like/etc/._cfg0000_gentoo-release while keeping the original/etc/gentoo-release untouched.

After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:

find/etc -iname '._cfg????_*'

will give you a list of the config files that need updating. Yes. Gentoo even informs you how to find these files. and nice big fat: "use 'emerge --help config' message is staring you right in the face if any new config files need updating.

This isn't something you can just bypass. Nice try. But please, give us a little credit if you're going to make something up!

After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:

find/etc -iname '._cfg????_*'

Actually, you can also do:

'etc-update'

This will walk you through the config files that need to be updated, and let you decide whether you want to accept the changes wholesale, discard the changes, or manually merge them in (it will even show you the differences between old and new).

uncomplicated upgrades.This is the only reason I switched all servers where I work over to gentoo. We need some special builds and such. I don't have time to download/compile by hand. Of all distros I have used Gentoo is the easiest to maintain and keep up to date.

It would be nice with a more enterprise geared gentoo though. It is very fast with upgrades to new packages, might break something. Doesn't happen often but if it does it's often easy to fix.

For the desktop there is no competition. Gentoo is the easiest "bleeding edge distro" to maintain. Alot of unstable packages to test out. And no need to go fully unstable if you only need a few packages.

Now I have about 10 different gentoo boxes at work to take care of. Every friday it takes about an hour of work to upgrade them. Could probably handle 20-30 with not much more time spent.

Speaking as a Gentoo user, I can be emerging a package and play quake3, admittedly I usually don't because it can get slow and laggy.

Certain things don't allow you to do that (ut2004-demo being the worst) because they are writing to the disk a whole lot, or something else. However, the things like that are rather few and far between.

Stages are more flexible than that. If you use a tool like stager or catalyst you can compile fully-optimized stage3 tarballs for your next install from the system you're working on already, so you can still use 'today's' machine while building 'tomorrow's'.

I have a stager script that I've hacked the bejeezus out of and configured to generate 2.6-headered NPTL systems that are fully optimized, even though the installs start at stage3. I've got flowcharts and stuff to keep track of the 'stage evolution'

so now you've got a fully-native NPTL stage1 to build other stages from and a fully-native stage3 ready to install.

My actual system is a lot more complex, as I build a 'generic i686' stage1 and then fork off to Pentium3 ad Athlon-XP builds for my different machines. I've also got a totally seperate stage geneology for the PPC build, but they all share the portage snapshots and configs for consistency.

I want to avoid scaring people away from Gentoo, but I do want to make it clear to Slashdotters that this isn't just like falling off of a log.

In short, here are some negative things to keep in mind:

Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built, or longer depending on your CPU/RAM/HDD. This also means your Mozilla install isn't a trivial event.;)

If you have problems, you're in a 'brave new world' so to speak. If you don't have a handle on the situation, it might require outside help and research to solve the problem.

Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones. Sometimes an install will fail simply because someone @ Gentoo didn't dot their i. Normal solution: report it and/or just wait a few days and the problem is almost always resolved on their end.

This is not a click-n-install, auto-magic-detection distro. You will be using the command line for most administration. Don't confuse me here, your desktop is very graphical (and quite nice!) and you've got all the good applications for email, browsing, etc. But administration is a command line task. This distro is not for you if you would rather drink curdled milk than use a command line.

In turn, here are some more (and some repeated from the parent post) good points from my view:

You can compile any program under the sun on your box, but for those that are offered by Gentoo you have some handy features available. All the information for available applications but the source code is stored on your computer. This means it's searchable. "emerge -s xmms" will give you a long list of plugins and other xmms (think WinAMP) related items.

Installing programs is one command. Want gaim? "emerge gaim" and come back in 5-10 minutes. Everything is downloaded, md5sum checked, and installed. No hunting for the latest versions of RPMs for your distro or grabbing a tarball yourself. Easy peasy.

Updating your system to the also a breeze. Update your local copy of all of the package installation files mentioned above (known as the Portage tree) with "emerge sync". In about 5 minutes, come back and run "emerge world -UD" and every package on your system will be upgraded to the latest available.

Community is there. Almost any problem can be found in the Gentoo Forums, and most all of them have solutions. I solve most of my problems with a quick search. Second to that, I check the bugzilla repository. Very rarely do I have a problem which isn't at least mentioned in either location, and most have a solution. But if you need interactive help, the IRC channel can be very helpful! I haven't spent much time in there, but when I do drop by there are generally at least two people getting help.

Gentoo's install guide is very detailed and geared towards novices. If you don't run into problems, for the most part you can just cut and paste commands to install.;)

Because of the way you install Gentoo, you become much more familiar with the way Linux works under the hood (GUI) and can, from there, be better able to solve any problems you run into. You also step into the realm of being able to install and maintain your own servers (www, ssh, ftp, mail, etc.) with your newfound systems knowledge. And it makes a good resume item.:)

Gentoo is bare bones, as mentioned in the parent. Nothing on the system you don't want there. This makes for a great feeling of 'having a handle on things.':)

Gentoo is for the computer user who likes to customize his environment and have control and know what is what. If you just want to 'use' your computer, go get Mandrake or Fedora or Windows. If you like

Up until then, I'd had some control over 7 boxen running RedHat, mostly RH8. I never moved to RH9 because I didn't like the emerging direction. Starting to cast about for a new distribution, I began to realize that I was thinking of support for family, etc, and not *fun*.

My dual-boot work laptop now runs Gentoo, as does my second (up and coming) server. Other systems are waiting for me to get more comfortable, and for the various nForce2 patches to stabilize

Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built... Yeah, no kidding. I was a bit suspicious about build times because often when someone jokes "this days days to compile" they mean "it took a long time" which could mean anything. Here's a real stat for newbies: I had a P2/450/384mb RAM, took a little over 8 hours (including reading manual, fixing mistak

Hmmm... I have no problem with my digital camera. Plug it in, run gtkam, copy pictures. In fact, I can only get the pictures on my Linux box since Kodak refuses to release drivers for Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

I should add, that your response is too typical of the linux community - "To get it to work is easy..just do such and such...oh it didn't work ? You must be ignorant" or some such insult. This is exactly the sort of nonsense that keeps linux from being widespead.

I feel I should add that it is NOT typical of the entire linux community. In the years I have been hanging out in the #gentoo channel on freenode, I don't recall ever once having seen someone say "You couldn't get it working? You must be ignorant."

I've used Gentoo since last October. Before that, I had essentially never seen a Linux machine. It is my first distro and I haven't really looked back. I've tried others just to see what they were like, mainly Fedora and Debian, but they just don't shape up to the standards I've put and Gentoo has given me. It took a while in the beginning to learn all the ins and outs, but now I can navigate through it with so much ease. Hoorah to Gentoo and its bleeding-edge innovation.

If you have never tried Gentoo, you should give it a try. Contrary to popular belief, you can have the base installed and running in 15 minutes, and from then you just emerge the packages you want. gentoo-dev-sources, openssh, sysklogd, vixie-cron, at, ntp, whatever.
The documentation is brilliant, and all the defaults for the packages are sensible, and well thought out.
When I install a box, I do it at about 4pm. Give it 30 mins to configure, and install a new kernel, reboot, and leave it to emerge -u world ; emerge kde mozilla overnight.
Couple of things though - emerge ufed, and gentoolkit - ufed is a gui for editting USE flags, and gentoolkit contains qpkg.

A very brief doc I knocked up is here [umtstrial.co.uk]. It's probably slightly out of date by now, but you get the idea.

Tip: Make sure to save copies of your XF86config, fstab, grub and kernel config files. They'll make life much, much easier than having to generate all those things from scratch.

If you don't have a previous installation of Mandrake, Red Hat or something like that, you should consider doing one before the Gentoo install. Their partitioning tools are easier than raw fdisk, especially if you want to resize a Linux partition. (Reformat them, though, for the Gentoo install.) Again, save those config files!

A better option actually would be to use the install from Knoppix method. Not only does the Knoppix CD comes with good partitioning tools, you can copy the XF86Config from the one it generates at startup.

I am relatively new to the Linux game, so perhaps I am just ignorant -- so please forgive me if that is the case. However, it seemed to me as an outsider that true geeks used Linux, while mortals used Windows and Mac. However, having joined the fray it seems that within the Linux community is highly fragmented. Now it seems that the true geeks use Debian and Gentoo, while the mortals use Mandrake and Redhat. Weird.-m

To the left is Gentoo (running 2004.1) on an Athlon XP 3200+ w/ 1Gb of RAM (my main workstation), to the right, Debian unstable on an Athlon XP 2800+ w/ 512Mb of RAM (currently in the middle of an apt-get dist-upgrade, and downloading what seems to be lots of KDE packages).

Meanwhile, I'm downloading FreeBSD 5.2.1 for my little router. So what does that make me?:)

Once you move to Gentoo you'll realize that true geeks use BSD. When you get there you'll realize they use Plan 9. And you'll never actually use Plan 9, because no one uses Plan 9, so the cycle ends there.

Somebody mod this guy "Insightful". There seems to be a huge "I'm a bigger geek than you" factor involved in OS choice, at least on SlashDot. Despite what the BSD guys seem to think, I use Linux because I like it and because I'm familiar with it, not "because I hate MS". Despite what most Linux users seem to think, I use Mandrake because it gives me a powerful, easy to use desktop, not because I'm a "Linux noob" (exactly the opposite: I'd like to leave my Linux admin workload at work, thank you!)

Very insightful. The holy wars within the GNU/Linux world are as isometric as they
are endless. Use
a soulless federation like Debian, a commercial
sellout like SuSE or RedHat, or a lovingly crafted, wisely designed, endlessly upgradable, feel at home source distribution like Gentoo. I leave it up to you!

Common misconception. Actually there is no "true geek" distro - at CodeWeavers which is staffed almost entirely by geeks, you'll see everything from Debian Testing (the CTO), to Slack to bleeding edge Fedora/SuSE releases. They are all Linux, after all.

Actually, with the Gentoo portage, current Gentoo users should be the ones least interested in new Gentoo distributions, since Gentoos portage allows updating of components to "the latest version" regardless of what cd-version you used to install it.

To me the greatest benefit of Gentoo is this: I do not need to blow a machine clean and install a new version or risk a lot with an uncertain install of large packages, I just gradually update my system as new versions become available!

And contrary to popular belief, Gentoo is pretty "user friendly" since it allows "on the fly updating". But this is of course once you actually have your system working flawlessly to begin with..:)

An interesting bit that can be added to the parent is the fact that the actual bootstrapping process for a fresh install of Gentoo doesn't actually need an installation CD.

I set up my home PC using a 1.4rc CD, but at work, I tried the "Knoppix install". You use a Knoppix CD (which is handy to have around anyway) to boot up, and set up your partitions. Then, you download the Stage 1 tarball from Gentoo, get the portage tools set up, and emerge the rest of your system. An advantage is that you can play games

Also, if you've been installing certain packages with the ALLOW_KEYWORDS="~x86" to get the 'bleeding edge' versions, an "emerge -u world" will 'downgrade' those packages to the 'stable' version.
And using a global keywords upgrade won't work since there are many packages that won't even compile without certain tweaks

The gentoo store's funds go directly to Daniel Robbins. This is planned to change as soon as drobbins has the not for profit org in place. Untill then your purchaces fund him directly not the gentoo project.

-Not that he hasn't done alot to deserve the money. But If your trying to support the community that supports gentoo you may want to wait untill the NFP community is actually created instead of funding the departing founder.

It seems that Drobbins could maintain ownership of the trademark and thus profit from the store indefinitely. That said, you obviously have not followed the effort and money that Drobbins has put into Gentoo. From a Gentoo Newsletter:

In addition, Daniel will retain royalty-free rights to use of the "Gentoo" trademark and the "G" logo, allowing him to continue him to run the Gentoo Store if he wants, in order to support his family and attempt to pay some of the $20,000 in debt he accumulated during his tenure as Chief Architect.

I think Drobbins deserves every penny that can be squeezed from the Gentoo store and then some. Thanks Daniel.

Yes, but this is time-consuming if you have 100 or more packages that need updating. I always go through the list, then mask out everything I don't want updated(in package.mask). Alot quicker. Of course, I'm the same person that emerges complete development packages, soo...

and you can and should do this whenever you want. The releases really are just for the install CDs. Gentoo is constantly evolving and updating. An emerge -UD will always bring you up to date. I would suggest doing this first though:

emerge -UDpv

This will display the ebuilds that will be updated and their use flags whether on or off. For critical packages I would emerge them seperately. I would also always follow with a run through etc-update to be sure your config

The -D flag will upgrade packages that were merged as dependencies of packages you specified and, as such, aren't necessarily in the world file. It can be a pain though if you have a number of ~arch packages installed because of dependency issues unless you change your ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to ~arch, but that would update everything to unstable which probably isn't what you want.

First of all, it is a pretty bad idea to use -U (--upgradeonly), because if the latest version of a package has some bug (either in the software itself, or in the ebuild), then you may well need to downgrade it (and portage will downgrade it [if needed] if you use the -u option). emerge -u is the Right Way.

For the OP, emerge -upv world to see what will be upgraded, and then do an emerge -uv world to actually upgrade it (or you can upgrade only the packages you want to upgrade from the list).

By far is esearch. "emerge esearch" will get you a suite of utilities that will index the portage tree and make it easier and faster to search the package descriptions. It will also sync and show you any new or updated packages since the last time you synced. A great addition to any Gentoo machine.

I tried Gentoo a while back, all the hype round here made it sound quite exciting. I installed the binary base, set all the build variables and let it do its thing.

The system it built for me wasn't noticably faster than my old Slackware install. It certainly wasn't worth the pain of the build process.

Gentoo worked just fine, but in the end I decided I preferred my old "home grown" Slackware setup because I already knew where everything was and how it all fitted together, so I dug out the tape and went ba

If you have the bandwith (which does cost a little) then how can it be overrated for the money, last time I checked it's free.

I agree that unless you use prelinking the system won't be noticably faster than any other distro. And prelinking won't help all packages at that.

I can't argue against using something that's firmilar but if you know what you're doing, if you've used one distro you've used them all. If you think that compiling everything from tarballs and solving dependancy problems on your own is

I guess since Gentoo uses tar.bz2, that is the cause you don't like Gentoo?

And 'emerge program' is easier than your world. It will:
a) Check and install all dependencies of 'program'
b) Unpack the source, run configure, make and install the 'program' for you.
c) Portage allows you to have several versions of a program installed due to it's use of slots.

Not beeing a Gentoo zealot, but I don't see how your argument is valid.

Don't forget to run etc-update after you upgrade; that way you can merge any changes to the config files in/etc. (hence the name "etc-update")

IMPORTANT!!!!: make damn sure you know what you are doing before running etc-update!!!! It is very easy to bork your system if you're not paying attention. Read the manpage and check with the forums before using it.

I literally just moved my home computer from Slackware 9.1 to Gentoo 2004.0 last week (ok, over the course of the last week!) and I have to say that it is indeed the slickest Linux distribution I have ever used!

I still run Slackware 9.1 on my laptop, which has 5/3 the memory and a CPU twice as fast as my home computer - but my new Gentoo box actually runs about TWICE as fast!! It's amazing how compiling everything w/ -O3 and -march=XXX really makes a huge difference. Last night I was simultaneously compiling OpenOffice, Evolution and Gimp, with no slowdown at all in my web browzing, development, etc!

Also, nvidia, sound, FB, kernel 2.6.5 worked the first time, plus it has thousands of packages to download (everything I need), and boots faster than Windows did on my faster machine (by ~8-15 seconds, depending on my readings).

One more thing - Portage is even more user-friendly than downloading *.tgz from linuxpackages.net and running installpkg. It searches for the right version from various mirrors, then downloads, does MD5 checking, and compiles automatically, and maintains a nifty little log, and checks for all dependencies. Also - it provides the most freedom I've seen in a distribution - nothing I don't need or want is installed. Getting evolution to be optimized to my machine is just a matter of typing "# emerge evolution"

Gentoo is indeed fan-freaking-tastic (if you have the patience to compile everything from scratch).

What is not often mentioned is the stable vs. unstable settings in portage. Ie, in/etc/make.conf is the setting 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"', which means unstable/testing packages, as opposed to "x86", which is just regular old stable pacakages.

There have been lots of issues over the past few months regarding improper (too hasty and with too little testing) moving of pacakges from ~x86 to x86. This often results in pacakges that will not compile cleanly in the stable branch for all users.

I've used Gentoo briefly as a workstation OS, but one thing I've wondered is how stable is it?

Is anyone using Gentoo in a server farm in a production environment? That's always been one of the strengths of Debian's stable release. You can run your servers for years at a time and never have an update break ANYTHING. Has Gentoo reached this level of stability yet or is it more of a bleeding edge kind of distro?

There's a lot of Gentoo lovin' going on here, and while I am a satisfied Gentoo customer more-or-less, people should realize that Gentoo is a very young and bleeding-edge distro. The good thing about Gentoo is that it'll teach you a huge amount about the inner workings of Linux. The bad news is that you'll be doing that learning as you're pounding your head against a wall trying to fix something that an "emerge -u" broke.

Some Gentoo developers just seem to release stuff without thoroughly testing it out. Here's some examples just from my own experiences over the last 2 months:

Well that, or deciding to install OpenBox as the Window Manager, and then having pure simplicity itself on my desktop as opposed to KDE or Gnome.

It has brought new life to my old HP Omnibook laptop, now 6 years old at least. Of course it was hell installing it, even with a Stage 3 install. The laptop was previously running Mandrake with Blackbox, and would run out of memory all the time (160MB installed) even without running much. Gentoo, by being custom all the way, means that I have memory spare, enough to run Apache and Postgresql and have a little portable web development machine.

The only thing that is scaring me is that I have just emerge -DUu world, and something has downloaded the kernel 2.4.21 headers when I have kernel 2.6.5 on my machine. I did emerge -pv world first as well, and this was not indicated, grrr.

Yes. You do not need to do system if you are doing world. World is a list of all packages installed on the system.

Further: Not using the -p switch to see what will be installed during your updates is probably a bad idea, though blindly doing an update is better than not doing updates at all... Certainly the official documentation suggests that you use the pretend flag to check dependencies. This will also tell you if somehow something you need for upgrading has been masked and cannot be updated.

I'm on 56k dialup, if I update weekly then the update remains doable (I actually use -fuvD with emerge then re-emerge without -f). If I leave it a month then it turns into several days of downloading packages before starting the compile.

Gentoo on dialup means regular updates unless you want to end up in download hell.

You can get binary stage3/grp install cd's or.iso's for your particular cpu and architecture.This lets you take advantage of both the speed of a binary install and a base system that's been optimized for your cpu class.

Gentoo has an installer? That's news to me! Seriously, though, Gentoo doesn't really need an installer because part of the point is to build your system from a minimalist base. Sure, some scripts could be hacked out to automate most things like HDD setup and extracting the stage tarballs, but I think that providing an excellent install document (as Gentoo does) that forces users to understand a bit more about what is really going on under the hood saves many times the effort on the backend when something

Gentoo doesn't really have an installer. The LiveCD gives you an environmentwhere you can do the installation yourself, but any environment that supportsthe network and chroot should work just fine (any live-cd or installedlinux partition should work just fine).

I have, in the past, installed an old minimal version of RedHat just to get anenvironment to install Gentoo from when I couldn't boot off of a CD. Does anyoneknow of a boot floppy that supports chrooting (Tom's didn't when I tried)?

Does Knoppix make a boot floppy? I'm only aware of Knoppix CDs.I'm looking for a boot floppy specifically because I have severalmachines that have floppy drives, but either don't have a CD drive orcan't boot off of it.

The original poster has valid point. If you are installing Gentoo on the underwear covered machine at foot of your bed than the current install procedure is fine. You have the time to spare. For production, one does not have the time to duplicate the tedious steps of the Gentoo install procedure for every machine.

The original poster has valid point. If you are installing Gentoo on the underwear covered machine at foot of your bed than the current install procedure is fine. You have the time to spare. For production, one does not have the time to duplicate the tedious steps of the Gentoo install procedure for every machine.

Perhaps not, but if one is a competent admin, one can quickly put together a python (or [insert your favorite scripting language here]) script to automate these tedius steps in response to a few quick questions posed at the start of the script.

That is what I did when we deployed Gentoo enterprise-wide for my employer. (Maintaining your own sync server, frozen to your enterprise's tested and vetted state, is also a wise thing to do. Still vastly more managable, flexible, and easy to keep up to date than any other distro I've come across, and over the years since my first pre-distro use of Linux back in '93 that is more than I care to count).

So only update when there is a security or stability fix that effects you.

Poor package maintenance and broken builds are increasingly common

You should have very few packages on a server. (For me it's (Apache, SSHD, mod_php) or (SSHD, postgres) or (SSHD, OpenLDAP, Courier))

Compilation is stressful on hardware but performance benefits have not been proven

So maintain a local portage tree and build binary packages for distribution across your server farm. You only need to build each package once. You could even set up distcc [gentoo.org] if you expect to have spare cycles on some of your servers

USE flags have limited flexibility and are more of an annoyance than a benefit

Is there a way in Debian or commercial distros to tell Qt to compile with support for Postgres or MySQL so you can install Rekall on your desktops (without recompiling it manually)? Is there a way to tell Courier whether or not to include support for OpenLDAP, MySQL, or Postgres?